In an alley in Osaka...

    Yesterday, we made the trip to the U.S. Consulate in Osaka to put in applications for Quincy's birth certificate and social security number.  I'm a bit let down with the U.S. Consulate--I thought we would be greeted with a welcome basket of Grape Nuts and US Weekly--hey, I can hope :).  They did have a T.V. playing a Bulls vs. Celtics basketball game, though, so I guess that was something!
 
Anyways, afterwards we took an alley to get back to the station.  Alleys here are actually little outdoor malls (some shadier than others) behind bigger buildings, and it's our experience that going down these alleys yields really awesome surprises.  We were not disappointed!

 First, we found  a really cool shrine nestled between two skyscrapers.  I really loved this wishing wall:

  Then, we found a little hole-in-the-wall Okonomiyaki restaurant.  I forgot to mention this earlier but the ferry we took to Osaka left at 1 a.m.  We realized this at 11 pm when I re-read the kanji on the ferry website.  So, we were running on literally zero sleep, and the kids got maybe about 4 hours.

  There are 2 styles of Okonomiyaki in Japan: Hiroshima and Osaka.  I love Hiroshima-style, but Osaka-style is good, too.

This is a shrimp okonomiyaki--they place a large shrimp on top for looks--you don't actually eat it whole.

And finally, we found the most awesome pet shop!  It had monkeys, a meerkat, and a crazy groundhog for sale!

This meerkat can be yours for a mere 600,000 yen--that's about $7500!

   After exploring a while, we were literally so dead on our feet, which is sad because Osaka has really cool shopping areas. We explored as much as we could! The kids were thrilled, because they got to ride a ferry, bus, and train in one day!  Our return ferry home got us back at 1:30 a.m., so it was a quick and exhausting trip--but the paperwork is in and Quincy's passport is on its way!